A(nother) Raving Leftist

[Richard Gibson]

A significant part of the marxism that I try to grapple with is the notion
that it is within a careful critique of what is, the material conditions
and all that flow from them, within all this are answers for what we might
envision for the future, even tho the answers might not be as easily
discvered as we would hope. This forms the ground for understanding, for
example, the relationship, in real life, of the need for great kindness on
the one hand, and the need for revolution, on the other. This
interpenetrating motion is part of people's daily lives, both in the
abstract and the concrete. This writing is what happens when it gets dark
early in the midwest...best r

At 04:55 PM 10/26/98 -0600, you wrote:
>
>
>Thomas Kruse wrote:
>
>>   I, like Brett Knowlton "can't abide" the present
>> state of things, though I fully acknoweldge I have no alternative plan.
>
>Partly quoted, partly paraphrased from memory: Writing recipes for the cook
>shops of the future is not our thing. Rather we must engage in an unyielding
>critique of all that is. [In so far as that critique *is* unyielding and
>threatens to be heard, it will lead to heavy and violent repression. And
hence
>another famous observation from the same old man]: The arm of criticism
must be
>completed by  the criticism of arms.
>
>Carrol
>
>Marxists have no crystal ball, Mao observed, and those who  insist that the
>present must not be challenged except in the name of a "plan" that persuades,
>they are simply supporting the present and all its horrors.
>
>
Rich Gibson
Program Coordinator of Social Studies
Wayne State University
College of Education
Detroit MI 48202

http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/index.html
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/meap.html

	Life travels upward in spirals. 

	Those who take pains to search the shadows

	 of the past below us, then, can better judge the

	 tiny arc up which they climb, 

	more surely guess the dim

	 curves of the future above them.